The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1887-08-08

small savings purchased farm and went
to raising hens They are doing nicely and
making plenty of money. Instances like
these i'll all parts of the country seem to
indicate that women are invading agricult-
ure as they have invaded nearly all other
imaginable professions.
OF course women have always worked
upon the farm, getting up at o'clock in the
morning to cook breakfast before the men
are up, doing the breakfast dishes, cooking
dinner, doing the dinner dishes, ironing or
sweeping, cooking supper, doing the supper
dishes, and sitting up till midnight to
wrestle with the heaped up mending basket
all this women have been doing on the
farm right along and no one has denied
them the right. But here's an alarming
innovation, for women are now becoming
Ill large numbers farm managers and own
ers, and doing precisely as well in this more
ambitious undertaking as the men. There
is always this difference between a working
woman and a working man as things go
now. If the woman works for wages She
will get less than the man for the same
service, If she is her own boss she is subject
only to the natural restrictions of competi-
ton, and can do, with equal ability and
capital, precisely as well as the man. One
OF the biggest retail clothing stores about
New York is owned and run to advantage
by a woman. If she were a working
tailor and made mems coats she
would barely escape starvation. It's a
very good thing, then, for woman to
manage her own business and stand an
equal chance in the worlds competition
instead of taking wages. And agriculture
is profession i'll some one of whose many
branches it is very easy for q woman to
manage business of her own.
1t is in the West that cases of this sort are
most frequent. The women farmers of
Nebraska planted $4,000 trees last year.
Women ranchers are numerous enough in
all the newer States and Territories, In
California the Pacific coast branch of the
Collegiate Aumn9 Association, intent on
exact figures as usual, has collected some
statistics of women's work in agriculture.
The results are remarkable, and paper
partially embodying them has been printed
in the Overland MOHth}y, and attracted
there much attention. In the Golden State
the average size of all farms is 463 acres;
the average size of the farms managed by
women is 4S9 acres A great many of these
farms are owned by widows, continuing
their husbands business, but many more,
perhaps a half, were purchased or pre-
empted. The women farmers of California
seem to have turned their attention
especially to the production OF fruit, silk,
honey, flowers and poultry One woman
hired Cinnamon to pick the fruit from a
81, 000 one year 50 400; usually about $1,000.
Another borrowed money at 10 per cent. q
to buy her farm, paid for it and won back
her shattered health besides. Another
advises cooperation, thinking that two or
three women can do better by combining
their heads, hands and money than by work
ing alone. One farm of 5000 acres is run
by woman. She inherited a half section,
320 acres, and has bought all the rest at
Nrn1.innC tjp1pC the other hand
of the most successful financially have less
than 40 acres of land.
But the successful women farmers do not
all live west Of the Mississippi. Some live
along its lower banks, like the silkworm
growers of the Gulf States, who have
formed an association differed entirely by
women and doing good work in the building
up of a comparatively new industry, or like
that woman who was made member of the
Sugar Planters Association the other day,
with many compliments for her experiments
and researches or like Mrs. Sallie d. Echols,
of jackson, Miss, who has one of the finest
herds of Jerseys in the South, or like the
hundreds and thousands of women through
out the South who have turned fingers
unused to work and brains which never
needed to consider economy to the hard
tasks and harder problems which dropped
from the shoulders of husbands and fathers
killed in the war upon theirs A good
many of them live in the East, too. know
one woman WHO'S one of the most success
full florists in the suburbs of Boston and has
great skill in coaXing fruit to grow in
winter to sell for fabulous prices. Since
the establishment of her greenhouse three
men have undertaken to compete with her,
but they do not, all together, do a business
anywhere near equaling hers, because they
lack the woman's taste in flowers.
Another Massachusetts woman farmer of
note is Miss Floretta Vining, of Hull the
largest taxpayer and best farmer i'll the
town.
One of the biggest farms near New York
is that of Mrs. Barnum, at Hampstead, Long
Island Mrs. Barnun hires about fifty men
most of the year She has some !, 300 acres,
| believe, or more than two square miles,
of land. There are hundreds of cattle upon
it and many fine horses. She keeps n
carpenter and blacksmith on the farm to
attend to its tinller.ng. She sIpervises
everything that is done on her premises,
and does it well. OF course, too, there are
plenty of women who farm for the fun of it,
like Rose Coghlan at Yonkers, or like Mrs.
Whitney, the fame of whose success as a
poultry raiser at Grasslands has become
national. But there are plenty of women
farmers dependent upon the land for live
lihood without referring to such fortunes
favorites as these. Most of them, too, being
women of unusual intelligence-else would
they, perhaps, be starving on the slim pro-
ceeds of fancy" work, with no fancy in it,
or trying to walk in some of the well-trod-
den conventional ruts in which women
travellers form such d packed procession
that, poor creatures, they don't give one
another room to stand-most of them hav-
ing had the good sense TO think for them
selves are as much at home in the drawing
room as planning the weeks work for the
hired men, ELIZA PUTNAM HEAToN.
A DIT ON unppnp